How To Read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason

Back in the Fall of 2010, I took a modern philosophy course.  It was a 300 level class, and many of the philosophers we studied I had never read before.  My experience was going well until we started reading Immanuel Kant, the man who revolutionized philosophy in the modern period by creating a compatabilist view of empiricism (sensory experience is the ultimate source of all our knowledge and concepts) and rationalism (some knowledge is independent of experience).  I enjoyed reading the various views of Descartes, Hume, Locke, Leibniz, and Berkeley, and after some contemplation, I was able to understand the bizarre and mind-bending views of these philosophers.  However, when we started reading Immanuel Kant, my head nearly exploded.  I gave up quickly and relied on the interpretations of the instructor and my friends to get me through the course.  

Since then, I tried to tackle Kant’s work Critique of Pure Reason in small chunks.  It has been a slow-moving train, and getting past the pedantic organization of the text and the scholastic terminology has been very difficult.  SparkNotes has been friendly to me as well.  Here are my tips to get through Immanuel Kant’s most reputable work while minimizing pain and confusion.

Before reading Critique of Pure Reason, read the Prolegomena, a short book in which Kant explains what the Critique is meant to accomplish- to discover the limits and scope of what reason alone can determine without the help of the senses.  This book is a valuable starting place to understanding Kant’s epistemology and metaphysics.  Also, look up SparkNotes and Kant’s lecture notes on logic because they will both give you a better idea of how he thought philosophy should be done.  Understanding his “logical method” is a key to comprehending his works.  Choose your text carefully.  I would recommend finding the version closest to the original as possible because while abridgments are tempting, they do not take into account that Kant included every sentence for a reason.  

The introduction is absolutely vital to understanding the rest of the book.  In the introduction, he defines important terms- transcendental aesthetic, intuitions, sensibility, synthetic judgments, analytic judgment, a priori, and a posteriori.  Attempting to read the book without knowing these terms first is a fool’s errand.  (Attempting to read the book knowing these terms is an educated fool’s errand).

In addition to these specific steps, I would advise you treat Kant as you would any other philosopher.  For me, that means take notes, question what you read, and use supplementary resources to further your understanding of what Kant meant.  

Any philosophy can be intimidating, but Kant is on a different level of difficulty.  In addition to an extremely difficult subject matter (the nature of knowledge and the limits of reason), Kant uses terminology that is altogether foreign to the common man.